Giving Back ~Jackson Morgan

Giving back to the less fortunate is something everyone should do. Giving back to the community holds a community together. People who give back not only help the people they are giving back to, but they can help themselves, helping other people just makes you feel so good about yourself. I haven’t done much service to talk about, but I’ve learned by just the very little I did what a difference it makes, to the people we helped. Not only that, but I learned that being a good leader helps a lot, and doing service grows your leadership skills.Leadership isn’t something that comes naturally. It is something that is developed. In SIA this year I think that my group and I really developed our leadership skills. At the SIA conferences, we went through many games and challenges that helped really grow my leadership skills.It wasn’t just SIA, in fact, I think that I developed my leadership skills in school as well by being placed in a leadership position. As a 9th grader here I was really in a position to be a leader and having never been in a position like this before I really had to step up. All of the younger kids look at us, so we need to be our best. Also as a 9th grader on the football team and one of the very few returning players I was elected captain, and that also put me in a leadership position. This really helped me grow as a leader because instead of teaching me how to be a leader, I was put right into a leadership position. Once I had these leadership skills I was able to really use them to help out. In community service, a little can go a long way. To be completely honest I do not think I did much in the way of service. I think that I could have done a lot more for the community and I didn’t. There is one thing I did that really helped out the community. As a grade, we helped plan for the canned food drive. This is something we were all very passionate about. Hunger is a real problem in our world, and it is something we are trying to fix. We figured that if the food drive was really going to take off we needed to give it a little push, so we rallied together, and came up with a plan, to get the whole school motivated to help out. We came up with a few important facts and went first to the fourth, and fifth graders to tell them why they need to help, and what they can do, and then we went to the sixth and seventh graders, and did the same thing. This really showed how far our leadership skills had come, and it helped make one of the biggest food drives Fenn had done. Giving back to the community is one of the most important things to do as a citizen, and it is one of the best feelings too. The most memorable moment for me doing service this year wasn’t actually doing the service but finding out how many people we had helped out by our service. After the canned food drive, we found out that we had helped over 100 people eat for weeks. That is about a third of our school’s population, and that blew my mind. It made me feel like I had really made a difference in the community, and it might not be that much but to feed those people it means the world, and that makes me happy. It also showed that hard work really pays off in the end, as a grade, we had put a lot of time into this and learning that we had really made a difference really made it all worth.Over the course of this year, I grew as a leader; I used my leadership skills to give back, I was able to make a big difference in my community.